If there’s one thing marketing professionals can probably agree on, it’s that the realm of digital content has created both a wealth of opportunities and a range of choices that boggle the mind. There are numerous statistics to serve as evidence but, suffice it to say, digital is part of the reality we live in.
In choosing where to disseminate your content, it can be deceptively easy to settle for casting a wide net and hoping it hits the mark with a massive audience. This strategy is a bit like a game of Battleship, where you guess the vectors in which your opponent has placed their game pieces, and the larger ships make the easiest targets.
But by leveraging the right data to understand an audience, a company can fine-tune its communications strategies and its content to resonate at a greater level with segments of its larger audience. A critical step in this process is to focus on relevance — identifying the relevant audience, followed by identifying the influencers and the content that will prompt them to act.
To this end, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide created our Influence Ranking™ product. Influence Ranking is built on a methodology that focuses not only on the typical attributes of reach, amplification and engagement, like many of the products on the market possess, but also adds significant weight to audience and content relevance. For example, an outlet or influencer can have enormous reach, but if their content is not relevant to a company’s target audience, their rank goes down significantly or they are not included.
The result is a multifaceted understanding of which outlets or individuals are most influential. Rankings can be further analyzed by audience type, media type, outlet or influential to get a more precise and customized view of results. This can help you identify how to assign resources and will provide a benchmark against which to measure future results.
By arming yourself with the right data, you can leave the guesswork behind and create content that is relevant to your audience and has a true business impact.
More information on Influence Ranking is available on Waggener Edstrom’s Products and Services page.
This week marks some great new enhancements to WE’s product Ripple Effect. The challenge, as with many products, is taking product messaging out of the “our product gives you feature blah, blah.. and oh yeah…blah“ — and translates that into something of business value.
This challenge is probably also shared by Intel. Take microprocessors — what takeaway to you get from a product announcement for a 22nm 3D Ivy Bridge processor? For us non-IEEE mortals, that chip means better performance and battery life than anything out there — allowing about twice as many transistors to be crammed into the same space as current 32nm chips. That’s got some tech types (and stock market analysts) VERY excited — especially as there’s demand on mobile, tablet and other devices to do more in less space and with less power.
Our Ripple Effect product shows which influencers or online publications had the biggest, most positive and longest lasting impact on a specific campaign, launch or announcement — say… the Intel 22 3D processor announcement last week.
The two views above show online linking and Twitter activity for the Intel announcement. In summary, the 25 websites and outlets covering the event produced 34 original posts, generated 570 comments. The subsequent ripple through social media included 204 links to the original posts from blogs and other online sources, and 2,906 tweets pointing to the original posts. That’s some pretty significant engagement!
What’s interesting is how much sites like Engadget, Ars Technica and the BBC were able to engage their audience. These three sites alone produced 68 percent or more of links and Twitter activity, and 91 percent of comments. In summary — these online publications had a significant Ripple Effect.
Build a digital newsroom
In recent days, I’ve had a burst of posts on how organizations can become media outlets, creating a well-rounded body of content to make an organization more appealing and maximizing owned digital properties.
We are particularly passionate about the strategy of creating a digital newsroom to help organizations address all of these ideas. The digital newsroom becomes the hub of content that flows out to social media and draws in the best curated content about your brand or organization.
Now, we’ve created a list of seven tips that you can follow to create a real-time content creation and publishing engine.
Let us know if you find these useful or if you have some additional ideas that can help organizations adapt and adjust to the new communications landscape.
Whether it’s Facebook updates, blogs, reality television or some other medium, audiences are using digital means to connect with other people or brands. For the most part, we have moved beyond vapid ads filled with falsely happy people and dry fact sheets that offer information, but no story. Audiences want engaging content.
Creating the kind of credible and authentic content that audiences will engage with is something that I covered in recent posts about what a body of content says about your brand and moving from being a publisher to a media outlet.
Your website should be a hub of content.
But once all this engaging content gets created, where should it live? And how will audiences find it?
The place to start is your organization’s website.
For the first years of the Web, sites were mostly static. Mostly that was because updating content on the Web was a laborious and technical process. The birth of blogging software and sites changed that paradigm. No longer did you need to know Dreamweaver or pay for an expensive content management system. The explosion of blogging, and now social media, has been led by simple content management systems and publishing platforms. But the innovation in site updating hasn’t spread to the corporate and organizational side.
Now is the time to leverage the power of your organization’s website to create a storytelling platform that hosts content and serves as the hub and engine for social media content.
With an engaging design and a state-of-the-art content management and publishing system, and by using social media to distribute content and leverage search, your website can deliver deeper engagement than traditional advertising. And you don’t have to pay to have someone else post the content.
Ford’s digital properties are a good example to follow. The automaker created The Ford Story to engage with audiences in a new way during the depths of the industry crisis. Now Ford connects its storytelling platform to its corporate home page (which aims to drive sales) with its media site that provides building-block content for influentials.
Microsoft’s News Center is another good example of leveraging an owned platform.
I’m presenting this week at the AdAge Digital conference with our Microsoft News Center partners on using a digital newsroom to tell a story about a brand. I hope to see you there.
A few weeks back Brian Solis wrote a great piece about the value of a digital persona in today’s social economy, which pointed out how people (and brands) will be judged by their Klout and PeerIndex scores because it will be the true measure of their influence. I completely agree, and I’m paying close attention to my scores and those of people and organizations that I align myself with.
What kind of shape is your brand's content in?
Do I want “high” scores? Yes, but not because I’m an ego maniac. I’m a student of the power of content, so it follows that any metrics that can track that power would be interesting.
Solis didn’t delve into what creates the digital influence that Klout and PeerIndex are measuring. Content is what creates influence in the digital space and what is most often getting measured in the EGOsystem, as Solis called it, with some more established digital metrics like search result rankings.
Not happy with your organization’s digital influence? What does your body … of content look like? Is it well rounded? Does it reflect your expertise or passions? Is it credible and authentic? Is it appealing to a wide audience?
That’s what it takes. If a brand or organization wants to build influence in the social economy, they need to fire up the content engine and start contributing some appealing, credible and authentic content. They then need to follow it up with engagement with existing content that aligns with the attributes they seek to develop influence around.
Additionally, there is increasing evidence that performance in the social economy has a direct correlation to the business performance of an organization. A recent study found that companies with blogs generate 67% more leads.
Why is content the key to making your brand or organization more appealing, especially on digital and social media? Because each image, tweet, blog post, YouTube video, Facebook update, Quora question is an opportunity for your audience (employees, partners, customers, consumers, etc.) to find out about you and learn something new. That engagement can come through a Web search or a link from a Twitter handle.
Once that connection is made, the content must be credible and authentic to your brand to make it valuable in the social economy.
The next step is to connect each individual piece of content, wherever it gets published or discovered, to your broader story. News sites are great at this Most Popular, Most Emailed and similar tools to drive the audience deeper into their content. As I wrote earlier, organizations should be cribbing from media organizations to maximize their social media efforts, and this is another example.
So if you want to sculpt your organization’s body of content into the most appealing shape it can be, fire up that content engine and start pumping out some great sets of content. And just like at the gym, try exercising with different types of content beyond text — video, audio, images, infographics — to create a well-rounded digital influence footprint.
Your Twitter handle needs to be fed. Your Facebook page needs to be fed. Your YouTube channel needs to be fed. Your blog needs to be fed.
Organizations using social media quickly realize that these digital properties are hungry beasts that demand to be fed often with content, or else they get stale and uninteresting. Without fresh, real-time content, social media properties lose their purpose as communications and engagement tools for customers, partners, employees, consumers, etc.
Social media is hungry for content.
Creating content for social media is often done by passionate, early adopters within an organization, usually working outside of the traditional communications departments. In many cases this has been a recipe for initial success (example: Ford’s Scott Monty) because traditional marketing, advertising and public relations haven’t been accustomed to, or adapted for, the real-time needs of social media.
Now that the benefits of leveraging social media are becoming clearer, as evidenced by this recent McKinsey Quarterly research illustrating the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies on the bottom line, more organizations are getting serious about their social media content.
But moving it from the responsibility of a few passionate, tech-savvy individuals to become part of an organization’s communications can be challenging.
Here are three tips for creating a real-time content engine that can feed the social media beasts:
Harness what you have. Whether your organization is a large, multinational, a small nonprofit or the dry cleaner on the corner, it has plenty of content that has been — and is being – published. That can include advertising, white papers, marketing and sales materials, press releases, emails and newsletters, internal communications, photos and videos, coupons; and the list goes on. While some of that content isn’t appropriate for external audiences or social media, most if it can be excerpted for a blog or Facebook post or turned into a tweet.
Employees or members should also be tapped for content. They have expertise and opinions that are relevant. They are also members of your community. A meeting or even a hallway conversation can be turned into something that your audience will find valuable.
To get started on harnessing what you have, do an audit of your existing content, people and content creation processes. Then jump to tip number 3.
Curate and engage with what you like. The content needed to power your social media doesn’t all have to come from you. If you are engaged in your community, the act of “liking” or retweeting can be enough to feed your social media outlets. This shows that you are paying attention and adding value to the topics and discussions relevant to your audience.
To get started on this, make sure you are following and listening to the content being created by your customers, partners, employees, etc. Then develop a process for amplifying the content that is most relevant to your organization.
Copy what the media is doing. I am biased because of my years as a journalist, but I think it’s fair to argue that traditional news media outlets have been leading in social media. Why? Because they develop a great deal of relevant, real-time content. They are harnessing social media by adding another outlet to their sophisticated publishing and curating processes. That might be as simple as hooking up a Twitter account to an existing RSS feed, or it might mean redeploying reporters and editors to listen to social media as a way to find out what news is happening. Social media presents an opportunity to publish your content on an existing platform that has an audience for free. But even if the publishing is free, someone needs to be making decisions about what gets published. Often, that is a trouble spot for organizations because there are either too many or too few people empowered to decide what gets published where. This is another place where media organizations can offer a template for success in social media. They have clear structures and responsibilities about who gets to publish content on their properties.
To get started, develop a newsroom structure in your organization, either by adding new roles or redeploying existing resources, to handle your social media publishing. This kind of structure can take much of the pain out of content creation and publishing, allowing content to come out of your organization that is credible, authentic and true to your brand.
Is your organization ready to take these steps to advance its business and communications goals?
Image courtesy possumgirl2 via Flickr.
As former media buyer, it wasn’t a huge shock to learn that the 159-year-old New York Times is betting the newsroom on whether or not readers are willing to pay to read it online.
Advertising, it would seem, no longer makes the world go round.
No, this won’t be a PR vs. advertising post, declaring a universal winner because one of the most globally noted newspaper decided to stop at a losing game. Marketing done well incorporates both strategies. (Sorry, I digress). People want direct access to the real-time news they want, and, apparently, consumers are fine with paying for it. According to The Times, more than 20,000 consumer survey responses confirmed pricing of “100 product combinations priced as low as $5 and as high as $40 a month.” Advertising as primary source of revenue stream appears in most cases to be a broken model. Consumers are voting with their wallets, signaling that they are tired of the signal-to-noise ratio while just trying to get to news they want. It’s not clear from this post if ads will be a part of the pay model or not, but I would think anyone paying for content deserves clutter-free news. 
As media specialists, this shift represents a huge opportunity to engage with the “true audience” that might develop from a successful pay model. I welcome the narrow focus on defining true influence. Then again, influence is an ever-moving target and variable that can be highly personalized – actually, there’s room for a whole separate post for the subject of influence alone. A recent post from Olaf Kowalik, vice president of product management and development at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide (WE), highlights some of WE’s tools used to identify and amplify influence to see who is making impact for clients and how they communicate within their community, as well how deep those relationships are and advise on how best to spread conversation. The Ripple Effect and Social Graph are a few of many offerings from WE’s Influence Toolkit. Oliver Blanchard has also done a good job detailing why “Influence is not a Jedi mind trick.”
What really happens if you lose a percentage of the audience due to the new model? Are they outliers who maybe weren’t paying attention to start with? Does it follow that you gain a refined audience of engaged listeners? Does this new core audience represent a more “accurate” circulation figure? Potentially, at least, a new industry standard could be born, shifting the thinking around the “norm.” Is bigger really better? Ideally, under this new model, one can target those who are actively listening and are therefore more likely to take action.
Will advertising go away completely under the pay model? If so, will that shift have any impact on how The New York Times covers companies, the economy and even politics? Investing in and being a part of how quality content is generated is what we get paid to develop, analyze and promote.
There are several current examples of other types of pay models doing fairly well:
- Traditional cable companies are seeing market share eaten upby pay-TV and by the likes of both Hulu and Netflix – especially among the younger demographics.
- Streaming on mobile devices is the latest channel to emerge and challenge the traditional ad-supported model of television. According to USA Today, 2011 NCAA men’s basketball tourney rating hits 11-year high. According to CBS/Turner, “Visits to its live streaming game coverage online and to mobile devices is up 47% this year, which is partly driven by coverage being available free to mobile devices for the first time.”
What are some other great pay models that you personally or professionally subscribe to? Would love to hear why you feel they are worth it. Do you believe that The New York Times can find success by asking readers to pay for content?
Edits by Julie (Arterburn) Evensen.
Images by Mike Bailey-Gates.
Video is more and more the go-to medium for online marketing efforts. It has the crucial ability to increase a website’s stickiness and conversion rate, but merely posting a video online isn’t enough.
Take the e-commerce industry, for example. Sixty-eight percent of retailers have deployed video. (Forrester, 2009)
However, only 4 percent of the top 200 retailers manage to get more than 100 videos indexed by Google. This percentage is a staggering contrast with the importance of search-engine based traffic for those retailers, which typically report that such traffic accounts for approximately 30 percent of their total traffic. (State of Video in E-Commerce, Q2 2010)
Exceptions to these statistics include Amazon, Overstock and Apple, which all have tens of thousands of videos indexed by Google, and have likely employed some of the following video SEO tips:
- YouTube. Be there. Since YouTube is the No. 2 search engine and fourth overall Web property receiving 2 billion video views per day, your video should likely be on YouTube if it’s consumer-oriented. Other YouTube tips worth pursuing (via Mark Robertson):
- Your site. Make it easy.
- Incorporate video results within your own site’s search functionality.
- A thumbnail trumps an icon and/or “click here for video.”
- Embeddable players enable viewers to promote for you.
- Help them help you. MRSS Feeds or XML Sitemaps tell search engines where your video is so they can make it available in search results, and with a thumbnail when possible. (Learn more via Google, Yahoo! and Bing.)
Nearly everyone is on board with the idea that video is an integral part of marketing strategies because of the visual medium’s potential for high ROI, but few are in the driver’s seat with video SEO, truly realizing the benefits that video can bring. What’s your idea for extending video’s reach?
To get a better understanding of where we are today we often need to look to the past. In a recent MediaShift blog post Craig Silverman shares insight about what was happening (or more accurately what wasn’t) in Turino, Italy, during the 20th Winter Olympics in 2006.
Graeme Menzies (formerly worked for Microsoft), now director of online communications, publications and editorial services for the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) noticed how much buzz YouTube was getting, yet it was not being utilized at the Turino games.
The social media landscape in 2006 wasn’t what it is today.
“The website is the mother ship,” Menzies said. 60 million site visitors over the period of the Games and somewhere near a 1.5 billion and 1.6 billion page views — and humbly admits they can’t possibly create it all and engagement with audience is a large focus.
Each medium has its place. The fans own the Facebook conversation. He Compares Twitter to a telegram and reminds us after a few minutes content may not be relevant. YouTube continues to be a huge draw.
They’ve also released a free mobile app, provides as much content as the Online Spectators Guide, Cultural Olympiad, news and up-to-date images from the web-site.
“We’re done at end of March, so our goal is to be in the moment…being ahead of the pack is just as bad as being behind. We don’t want to be on the bleeding edge or behind the times. We want to be in the moment.” Of course this will change by 2012 for the next round of Olympics…..
This is a great example (imho) of learning from the past, moving forward with a strategic media plan (which includes traditional mediums not discussed in depth here) and using current digital media tools to reach specific audiences and engaging with different demographics in campaign with a short time span.
Yes, the action is right in our backyard but the passion surrounding this Winter Olympics seems to be at crazed level this round, eh? How are you following the 2010 Winter Olympics events? What do you think we’ll see change as we move forward in 2012? Sadly, I know I just have a few more days “to be in the moment.”
Ever since I showed this picture to Thinkers and Doers’ contributing editor Mike Foley, he’s been asking me when I would put it up on this blog. Well, Mike, you’ll be happy to know that day is today. As luck would have it, Engadget decided to publish a short post about their gear being used during their CES coverage, so it seems only natural to address what I used for my work around that same event.
I wasn’t on the ground like the Engadget team, so rather than focusing on capturing content in the wild (with their “digital cameras of all shapes and sizes,” USB encoders and other gear to maximize largely unwired reporting), I arranged my setup to ensure that I was monitoring the pulse of the event real-time from my Seattle HQ. Note: The photo above is my night station as my day setup is considerably less interesting to view and would be more open to “The Office” comparisons.
Also, unlike the Engadget squad, the hardware is not among the most interesting components. For posterity’s sake, however, I’ll give a quick overview of some of the tools that I used to monitor Twitter, blogs and other Web activity around CES.
Hardware:
- On the table: One laptop connected to an external monitor for dual-screen use. Controlled by external keyboard and mouse to maximize typing and scrolling.
- On the TV stand: One desktop connected to larger LCD monitor (aka 37-inch living-room TV). Controlled by wireless keyboard and mouse.
- On the table: One laptop with external mouse.
- On the couch: One smartphone for calls and texts to the team.
Sample of monitoring tools and other applications:
- Tweetdeck: Used to monitor key terms of interest to clients around CES keynotes and events.
- IceRocket: Used to determine what was being said by whom with the benefit of getting to know follower count on the same screen.
- Twitter Search: Used to monitor other terms and refreshed frequently in various browser tabs.
- Collecta: Used for real-time news searching.
- Google News: Used to search key terms and determine client position in articles.
- Live streaming sites: Queued up whenever possible. (Live streams are watched on the largest screen.)
- Twendz/Twendz Pro: Used to identity key tweets by sentiment, influence and more.
In addition, there were a number of other sites referenced and applications used to best guarantee that our team and our clients had a real-time pulse, ensuring that hackneyed catch-phrase wasn’t the case here.
